Researchers at Kyoto University in Japan have used artificial intelligence (AI) to reportedly teach a robot, named Erica, to mimic natural laughter, including decisions around appropriate types of laughter.
In a report titled ‘Can a robot laugh with you?: Shared laughter generation for empathetic spoken dialogue’ published in Frontiers in Robotics AI, the researchers outline how they trained Erica to behave in a more human-like manner.
“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy,” said lead author of the study Dr Koji Inoue, an assistant professor at Kyoto University in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology.
“Conversation is, of course, multimodal, not just responding correctly.
“So we decided that one way a robot can empathise with users is to share their laughter, which you cannot do with a text-based chatbot.
“Robots should actually have a distinct character, and we think that they can show this through their conversational behaviours, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style.
“We do not think this is an easy problem at all, and it may well take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.”
To teach the robot conversational laughter, the team used training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and Erica, who was operated by female actors.
The data was then interpreted for individual laughs, laughs brought on by social cues without humour (such as embarrassed laughter) and then normal laughter, from humour or happiness. Accordingly, the data was used to help a machine learning system make decisions about when laughter was appropriate and to select the relevant mode of expression.
The audio files were designed to instruct the algorithm about the basic principles of social etiquette around laughter.
A series of four brief two to three-minute dialogues between humans and Erica were used as a test for the system, which reportedly performed well.
However, the research team has stated that further development is needed if Erica is to mimic truly human-like conversations and laughter.
